Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

Chapter 1 of Stony the Road presents the contemporary US against the backdrop of the post-Civil War era. It begins with the 2008 election of Barack Obama to the US presidency, which Gates compares to three momentous events in Black history: the Emancipation Proclamation (1863), the legal abolishment of enslavement with the ratification of the 13th Amendment (1865), and the Reconstruction Acts that reintegrated the South into the Union (1867-68). For many commentators, Obama’s election marked the “dawn of a post-racial America” (2). It also revived the metaphor of the “New Negro”—a “new” type of Black person who was educated, eloquent, and elegant. For Gates, the evocation of the New Negro connected Obama’s presidency to the post-Reconstruction era, the period in which the term was coined to combat rising racism in the South. Gates compares the dismantling of Reconstruction gains during Redemption and Jim Crow to the rollback of Obama-era policies by the alt-right under the leadership of Obama’s successor, Donald J. Trump. According to Gates, the election of the first Black president triggered a public expression of white supremacy that harkened back to the post-Reconstruction era.

A Look at Reconstruction

This section focuses on the resurgence of white supremacy during Reconstruction. In 1863, less than five months after Union armies defeated the Confederate States, Abraham Lincoln called for “a new birth of freedom” during his Gettysburg Address (6). The status of formerly enslaved people changed after Congress passed the Civil Rights Act and after the ratification of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, which abolished enslavement, granted citizenship to formerly enslaved people, and gave Black men the right to vote, respectively. Congress also passed four Military Reconstruction Acts that prevented the southern states from depriving “any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law [or] deny[ing] to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws” (7). The effects of Reconstruction were far reaching, with Black men soon holding positions in every level of government, including the Senate and Congress. Reconstruction gains, however, eroded during the Redemption period, when white southerners made concerted efforts to strip Black people of their rights and paved the way for Jim Crow segregation. Gates points to the erosion of Reconstruction gains as evidence of white people’s lack of commitment to racial equality in the North and South: Supporting the abolition of enslavement did not mean that white people believed formerly enslaved people should have equal rights. The Civil War ended enslavement, but it did not end anti-Black racism.

A Second Slavery

This section centers on the South’s exploitation of Black labor to support its cotton economy. Ruined by the political and economic effects of the Civil War, plantation owners devised the sharecropping system, whereby white landlords allowed Black people to use their land in exchange for a share of the crop. The system indebted them to landowners, kept them poor, and enriched white landlords. White supremacy justified this “second slavery,” which emerged alongside Reconstruction-era policies.

“A War of Ideas”

This section addresses post-Civil War propaganda. The southern Lost Cause myth promoted the idea that the Civil War was not about enslavement or treason, but was instead a heroic battle against federal overreach. Lost Cause advocates accepted the end of enslavement but not Black equality; some even argued that enslavement benefitted Black people by Christianizing them. Meanwhile, Northern activists combated anti-Black propaganda. For example, Frederick Douglass shaped his own image by writing three autobiographies and sitting for photographs to counter negative stereotypes of Black people. With words and images, then, Douglass combatted white supremacy long after the Civil War ended. Douglass’s activities coincided with Reconstruction, a period of optimism in Black communities fueled by newfound freedoms and rights.

Opposition

This section addresses the opposition to Reconstruction, focusing on Black people’s right to vote. White people across the South used violence and intimidation to prevent Black men from voting. Opposition also occurred at the government level. President Andrew Johnson, for instance, opposed Black voting rights during an 1866 meeting at the White House, claiming that supporting Black suffrage violated the notion of federal nonintervention and that states should have control of such decisions. President Johnson reiterated his position in an 1867 address to Congress, in which he also promoted white supremacist ideas of Black inferiority. By 1890, momentum for Reconstruction had ebbed, while white supremacy flourished, in part because the courts failed to enforce Black suffrage.

How Did Reconstruction Fail?

In this section, Gates outlines the ways in which white supremacists used the court system and the legislature to dismantle Reconstruction. Upheaval after the Panic of 1873 (a financial crisis that triggered an economic recession), a shift in priorities in the North, violence, intimidation, and fraud gave white Democrats control of Southern state governments from 1869 onward. These governments closed integrated schools, preventing Black people from furthering their education. Moves at the federal level also eroded Reconstruction gains. In 1865, President Andrew Jackson reversed a federal order to redistribute former plantation lands to Black people, only allowing those who had paid for their land to remain on them. Judges and legislators at both the state and federal levels also dismantled Black rights. For example, in 1876, the Supreme Court struck down sections of the Enforcement Act (United States v. Reese), ruling that the 15th Amendment did not guarantee the right to vote but only prevented race-based limitations on voting, thereby empowering states to set their own qualification for voting. The Supreme Court also struck down a section of the Ku Klux Klan Act in 1883 (United States v. Harris), ruling that the 13th and 14th Amendments applied only to the actions of states, not individuals. In 1896, the Supreme Court further restricted civil rights by ruling against a biracial man who was jailed after sitting in a white-only train car in Louisiana (Plessy v. Ferguson). The federal government’s refusal to intervene in rights violations emboldened southern Democrats to replace their Reconstruction-era constitutions with new constitutions that included disenfranchisement provisions. Court cases and legislation eventually enshrined Jim Crow segregation and reinforced white supremacy. Despite attacks, however, Reconstruction initiatives continued to surface from the late 19th century until the rise of the civil rights movement in the 1950s.

Backlash: The White Resistance to Black Reconstruction

This section consists entirely of images, some of which present Black people in a negative fashion, others of which depict well-known activists, such as Frederick Douglass. Their juxtaposition illustrates how visual culture was weaponized against Black people, and how some Black people responded to these attacks.